Wednesday, December 4, 2013

I never would have bothered to review this lens had I not seen a Facebook post from one of the best Fashion photographers / print masters ever, Douglas Dubler. He mentioned in a casual personal posting that this was a very sharp lens that impressed him. I almost dropped dead on the spot because Douglas is the kind of guy who does NOT settle for second best, so to me this was like a Formula 1 race car driver hopping out of their car and bragging about the performance of their Buick! I was like – what the heck???!!!! However, I know Douglas well and he’s a tough New Yorker who tells it exactly like it is. If he says something is good, it’s fantastic and no amount of money in the world is going to make him say that if it isn’t true.

With this in mind my mind as I arrived out to see Douglas in New York for the PhotoPlus Expo, I asked him to take me by the Sigma booth to show me this lens he was so excited about. While I was there they were kind enough to offer me a test drive of this lens to prove that Douglas hadn’t sold out because this really was a great lens.

After using this lens occasionally around my house, I quickly got excited about its potential. I decided to buy some flowers and bring a few models over to the studio to see what it could do. Read on to see if it lived up to the hype, or if I’d be disappointed yet again.

Sample Images

The shot above was post-processed for impact, but you can click it to see the full unedited in-camera original.

Excluding the shot above, all of the images below and in the gallery are all in-camera JPEG’s take using a Canon 1D X. Zero post-processing has been done on these photos beyond what Canon does for its internal in-camera RAW processing, so what you see below is what you can expect to get with this camera and lens combo. 6D users should get nearly identical results under identical conditions, and 5D Mark III users can expect results that are almost as good.

I did not test this lens with any other cameras, so I can’t comment on their quality – however I’d expect similarly excellent results with other camera bodies as well. The only variants would be the performance of the sensor and in-camera processing results.

35mm is also a terrible focal length for portraits (I prefer 200mm), but photos of people really help you see the strength of this lens. As a result, I’ve included a few mug shots below just to illustrate this point.

Click here for a full gallery of over 65 images (and nearly 1GB) unprocessed JPEG images exactly as they came out of the camera. Some images repeat because they’ve been taken at different apertures, and some are intentionally underexposed to offer more detail in the shadows to offer more tonal range to explore. All non-studio images at ISO 100 were taken on a Leica tabletop tripod and ball head, but the rest (including the studio) were all handheld. The outdoor handheld shots were taken using the tripod against my body for additional stabilization.

Bookshelf Test

Fans of my blog are intimately familiar with my bookshelf test. If you aren’t, then just check out the camera reviews at the end of this article for links to learn more.

I was very impressed with the sharpness that this 35mm lens offers. The gallery has many more shots, but I wanted to show the maximum aperture of f/1.4 here as well as the sweet spot at f/5.6 (based on what I see for the blur test on SLRGear.com)

Sigma USB Dock

One advantage of buying Canon lenses is that you can use the EOS Utility to download your peripheral illumination correction and distortion control data from Canon’s web site. This gives you virtually distortion and vignette free in-camera images, but this feature only works for supported Canon lenses. The Sigma USB Dock brings the ability to fine tune the focus, update the firmware (yes, lenses have firmware), and advanced settings (like AF / OS speed for supported lenses).

It’s a really cool enhancement that cost less than $60. I’ll be reviewing one of these over the next 30+ days, so come back to my blog to learn more about it!

Conclusion

Crunch, crunch, crunch – what’s that sound???!!!

Yeah, it’s me eating a little humble pie because I’ve been overly harsh on Sigma in the past. Much of my previously negative opinions came from being underwhelmed by lenses I tried around 2007 & 2008. Since that time Sigma has had tremendous success and it’s clear that they’ve invested their profits into improving quality and performance.

I consider this Art Series lens to be as good as or better than any Canon L lens that I’ve tested, and that’s a HUGE statement coming from me. I never thought I’d ever say that about a Sigma lens because even its much loved Sigma 85mm f/1.4 EX DG left me impressed with the sharpness but underwhelmed with the color, brightness and build quality. I wasn’t alone in my concerns about Sigma quality, but it is VERY clear that this ain’t your granddad’s cheap ass Sigma lens – this is really the good stuff.

I wholeheartedly HIGHLY recommend this Sigma lens. It’s truly outstanding! At $899 (as of the time of this article) it’s a great value too, so I’ve put it on my wish list for the next time I have spare bucks to buy a 35mm prime.

My only gripe about this lens was that it’s a bit dark and vignettes heavy at f/1.4.

Disclosure

If you make a purchase using links found in this article, I may make a commission. It doesn’t cost you a penny more, but it does help to support future articles like this. Sigma has loaned this lens to me for the purpose of evaluating it – at my request.

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